It was a Victorian fun palace, nestling in parkland in the gentle hills above Muswell Hill in suburban North London. In the 1930s, Alexandra Palace was the start of something that took over the world.
But the Palace was lucky to make it to the twentieth century, let alone become the birthplace of television. The Palace first opened in 1873 as "The People's Palace" to provide Victorian London with a recreation centre. Sixteen days after it opened, when 124,000 people had visited the Palace, it burned down after the dome caught fire.
On 1st May 1875, less than 2 years after the destruction of the original building, a new Palace, covering 7 acres, was opened.
The Birth of TV
Alexandra Palace was chosen as the location for the BBC to transmit high definition television in 1936. On 2 November 1936, the BBC launched the world's first public service of high-definition TV. Until a final decision to use Marconi-EM's electronic cameras rather than the Baird mechanical in February 1937, the electronic 405 lines system alternated week by week with Baird's of 240, the transmitter having to switch between the two systems. Marconi's on-line museum includes a copy of the original press release issued by the BBC announcing the beginning of the Television Service. It seems a curiously uneventful announcement, when you bear in mind how much it would change the world within a quarter of a century. The Marconi museum also stores film clips, but don't think about trying to see them unless you have a broad band connection!
The BBC's Television Service was closed down during the war, but reopened in 1946 as if it had never been away. Conditions there were Spartan, but staff who worked there in those early, heady days say they had enormous fun. The Times newspaper of London carried this piece in January, 1938, describing working conditions at Alexandra Palace (or AP, as the BBC called it).
Television is incongruously housed. Gaunt and unlovely, the Palace dominates part of North London, with only the 220 foot mast to indicate the marvel in the south-east corner. An inadvertent entry by the back door brings the visitor over a desolate branch terminus of the L.N.E.R. into empty, echoing halls, where the assorted objects might have been gathered by a surrealist. Sections of stuffed lions, slot-machines, a bar, posters of dance competitions, and a statue of Lincoln are distributed haphazard. Only a discreet grey door in a corner, painted 'No Entry', marks the back entrance to the overcrowded hive of television. Here the essentials are in the vision and sound transmitting halls on the ground floor, and in two studios above them, one of which is a second string formerly used for the Baird system. On the other side of a narrow corridor, which is both artery and boulevard, are the make-up and dressing rooms, and on the ground floor is a small restaurant. The executive staff's rooms are in the east tower, and in the north-west corner of the building, separated from the rest by the Winter Garden, is the carpenter's shop and an old theatre which the station has acquired with an open mind for whatever purpose it may be needed.
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